Mad Cow Toll
In U.K. Is Less
Than Feared

By

Gautam Naik Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Updated Jan. 12, 2004 12:23 a.m. ET

LONDON -- Right about now, Britain's hospitals could have been full of thousands of patients dying a slow and agonizing death because they ate infected beef and contracted the human form of mad-cow disease. That was the frightening scenario suggested by some scientists when the disease first appeared in the U.K. in 1996.

Thankfully, extreme predictions of up to 500,000 annual U.K. deaths haven't come to pass. So far, a total of 139 Britons have died of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD, the brain-wasting malady...